Dual-Core CPU Opens Door To 1080p On Smartphones

An anonymous reader writes "Following Qualcomm, Samsung is also close to launching a new smartphone processor with two cores. Based on ARM architecture, the new Orion processor promises five times the graphics performance of current chips and to enable 1080p video recording and playback. Next year, it seems, dual-core smart phones will be all the rage. Apple, which is generally believed to have the most capable processor in the market today, may be under pressure to roll out a dual-core iPhone next year as well."

Comments

Dual core iPhone

[Jadware]

...so you can drop calls twice as fast.

Re:Dual core iPhone

[PixetaledPikachu]

Twice? Try three times. I paint my notebook red

Re:Dual core iPhone

[WrongSizeGlass]

As an iPhone owner I'd like to make it perfectly clear that we don't need dual cores to drop calls twice as fast. We're doing OK in that department already, TYVM.

Okay then

[Jbcarpen]

My parallel programming professor likes to harp on the fact that nearly all new computers in the future will be multicore. Apparently he's right.

Re:Okay then

[Jedi Alec]

Isn't that future pretty much here already? If I look at the offerings from the local pc supply place, even the lowliest 50 buck cpu's come with 2 cores.

Re:Okay then

[Jbcarpen]

It's not yet present in embedded devices, which he thinks it will be. And smartphones were one of the few places in normal computing where it used to still be single cores.

Re:Okay then

[iamhassi]

"My parallel programming professor likes to harp on the fact that nearly all new computers in the future will be multicore."

The future is now then, that's not much of a prediction.

Re:Okay then

[Vegemeister]

Not really. They offload all sorts of things to dedicated DSPs.

Re:Okay then

[ciderbrew]

I didn't see that happening.

Re:Okay then

[ledow]

The GP2X is a dual 200Mhz processor handheld console that runs off 2 AA batteries and was released in 2005. It was not that revolutionary, it was not that expensive, it was not that difficult to program. You can program on both chips so long as you don't mind temporarily ditching the in-built MPEG-decoding firmware that runs on one of them (it's replaced on each bootup) or being very careful where you tread. The Nintendo DS was multiprocessor. And not in the unconventional sense of "one CPU and a handful of support chips", two real, full, general purpose, programmable chips. Most modern games consoles have more than one real chip, many of them using multiple specialised processors (e.g. IBM's Cell in the PS3 which is a "9-chip" component).

Massive parallelism has been around forever and it's in consumer electronics already and has been for quite a while. It might not be *designed* like that but you have always had home computers with multiple processors that can be programmed to operate in parallel. There were people misusing floppy drive controller chips and sound processors to do all sorts, and the GPU is "another" processor now, and one that's extremely good at running lots of things in parallel. Do you think that your CPU could ever keep up with software-rendering on a modern game? Or that a single-core "general purpose" GPU could?

Your professor is right, except for his timescales - parallelism is already here, right down to tiny embedded systems, and has been for years. Just that hardly anybody uses it without some seriously specialised programming design beforehand. That tells you quite a lot about how expensive it is to use effectively. Hell, to a new programmer, even threading and re-entrancy can be a huge nightmare for them and our solution at the moment is blocking locks and things like that (so that we can *think* about them being seperate linear instances). If you can become an expert in parallelism you'll probably have a good career ahead - but a specialist one. Everyone else is just waiting until they can pass everything off to a dedicated chip and get told when it's finished - they don't *WANT* to properly program parallel programs (tongue twister!), they just want everything to happen serially and faster, or the closest approximation to that that they can get.

Seriously, when you program any graphics library, you just throw a huge amount of 3D object data into another processor and let it get on with it. You don't care if it runs at 6GHz, or whether it's got a separate internal processor for every pixel of the final image running at 1MHz, so long as it damn-well draws the screen as quickly as possible and tells you when it's done. Parallelism is a hidden facet of modern architecture precisely because it's so necessary and so damn complicated to do it right. Programmers, on the whole, are much happier with linear processes. It's taken games this long to pass off physics, AI, etc. to a separate thread, and we've had threading for DECADES.

Parallel things are just a placeholder at the moment because we can't up the GHz much and if we could, it wouldn't help that much with the tasks we want to do. So even operating systems are handing off everything they can to other chips - Ethernet TCP offloading, GPU, sound-processors, RAID, you name it. It's all about making the general-purpose CPU's do as little as possible so the main use of the computer can continue uninterrupted. And parallelism is only used to increase the things we can do, not break tasks into much more efficient subtasks. Most people who have dual-core or above in the early days wanted it so that other things (e.g. antivirus) got out of the way of the real process (e.g. games!) so it could have as much time running in it's single thread as possible.

Parallelism can see fantastic gains but it needs to be done from the design stage each time. Mainstream multi-core products are too much of a moving target to do anything more fancy than run a number of huge, single-threaded programs at the same time. That's *not* the same thing, and never will be. Parallelism is specialised. Games programmers would give their right arm for everyone to have a single 100GHz processor instead.

Re:Okay then

[TheRaven64]

Smartphones have been multicore for at least ten years. The early ones had two separate CPU cores, one for the application stack and one for the phone stack. One of the design requirements for the Symbian EXA2 kernel was that it should have a hard realtime nanokernel that could run both as completely independent software stacks on the same CPU core, cutting costs.

Even when they then only had one ARM core, the SoCs were heterogeneous multicore chips. Something like TI's OMAP3530, found in a lot of devices, has a CPU core, a GPU core, a DSP core, and a couple of other specialised cores.

That's why the headline here is quite misleading. Doing 1080p H.264 decoding on a pair of 1GHz Cortex A9 cores might be possible, but it seems very unlikely. Chips from the last generation, however, could all do 720p H.264 decoding on the DSP and / or GPU cores. This is not a chip that has enough processing power in the ARM cores to decode 1080p video, it is a chip that has two ARM cores and also, independently, has enough processing power to decode 1080p H.264 streams.

This part of TFA made me laugh:

Apple’s A4 processor, which is based on an ARM Cortex-A8 design, has been generally described as the most capable chip combination in the smartphone landscape today

I don't know who these people are, but I suspect that they are ignorant Apple fanboys. The thing that makes the A4 interesting is that it removes a lot of stuff that most ARM SoCs ship with, because Apple didn't need them. Photos of the die indicate that the A8 core (the same core that everyone else has been using for a year or two) is a stock part, unlike, for example, the Snapdragon which is very heavily tweaked (new floating point pipelines and so on).

Re:Okay then

[Aeros]

This is the new future. We're already in 'that' old future.

Re:Okay then

[DurendalMac]

Yeah, I thought that was kind of weird that they pointed to the A4 chip. It's definitely good at power management, but that's by virtue of Apple chopping out the parts they didn't need. I think the next ARM chip that Apple comes out with will branch out a bit more, though. It'll be interesting to see what happens with a bunch of different companies making their own ARM chips.

Apple?

[exallon]

Since when have iPhone been about following the trend? They are completely relying on their fanboys/girls running iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii when they release something. Don't expect an iPhone dual core the next 2-3 years.

Re:Apple?

[dattaway]

But the iPhone will have Dual iCore® technology. And have Steve Jobs' approval.

Re:Apple?

[flanktwo]

What's the benefit of processing using imaginary cores?

Re:Apple?

[Nursie]

Who needs multiple cores when multi-tasking has been decreed irrelevant?

Or did I miss an update where multitasking was invented and gifted to the world by Apple?

Re:Apple?

[aiht]

Who needs multiple cores when multi-tasking has been decreed irrelevant?

Or did I miss an update where multitasking was invented and gifted to the world by Apple?

Yep, apparently (well, kind of).

Re:Apple?

[iamhassi]

"Since when have iPhone been about following the trend?"

True, seems like they've been setting the pace. Touchscreen phones were pretty much non-existent outside of the Palm and a few Windows Mobile 6 phones until the iPhone came out, and even those phones were highly dependent on a stylus, iPhone was the first touchscreen without a stylus. Ever since the original iPhone everyone's been playing catch-up, and while others offer faster cpus and more megapixels, no one offers the 200,000+ apps or the huge fan based and the chance to be a millionaire app developer. In fact some of the largest Android game developers have boycott the Android Market. Do I care if the camera is 3mp or 5mp? No. Do I care if the phone offers the apps I want? Of course, these aren't just phones anymore, they're pocket PCs

Re:Apple?

[darthdavid]

So what you're saying is that you want to pay your hard earned money for a PC that the developers will actively seek to prevent you from gaining root access on, who's apps can only come from one place (if those android game devs were deveoping on apple's platform they'd be SOL. On android they're free to set up their own market, distribute without a marketplace app or use one of the other marketplaces that already exists). And I've certainly heard enough horror stories about the review process to turn me off from ever trying to sell anything on the iphone.

Re:Apple?

[Vegemeister]

Well, yes, if you either cannot afford a dedicated camera or don't want to lug one around.

Re:Apple?

[trickyD1ck]

So what you're saying is that you want to pay your hard earned money for a PC that the developers will actively seek to prevent you from gaining root access on, who's apps can only come from one place

Yes.

Re:Apple?

[Dr Max]

Of course, these aren't just phones anymore, they're pocket PCs

You do realize that before there were either palm os or windows mobile 6 (or 5), there was pocket pc 2000 and pocket pc 2002 (Compaq, hp, Toshiba, dell and many others made pocket pcs). Small touch screen tablet software built on windows ce 3.0 (some versions with phone ability). If so your quite apt that apple sees a profitable market, moves into it copying other technology, and rushing its products to market. Only years latter to catch up. I agree with you good sir.

Re:Apple?

[dropadrop]

My guess is that the guy who wrote that pcworld article has not actually programmed for the iPhone. The article makes a big deal of the programmer having to do something about adding multitasking to their applications, but from what I've gathered from a few colleagues who have made some iPhone apps (some very popular) it actually requires an extremely small amount of work. By Wikipedias definition of multitasking the iPhone does multi-task, though I've noticed a lot of people trying to redefine the term lately. :D

I'm not a big fan of the way the iPhone multitasks, but then again I previously only missed multitasking for things like Skype or IRC which are next to useless without the ability to run them in the background, and GPS apps which would shut down when a phone call came. I can say that multitasking on the iPhone is much smoother then it used to be on my previous Nokia phone, because that would just keep silently killing the background apps due to lack of memory (for example opening email and a big web site in the browser would suffice for this effect).

Re:Apple?

[Bing Tsher E]

I have this vision of a chair throwing Steve Jobs. He's on stage yelling 'Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing....'

Re:Apple?

[Bing Tsher E]

What if I don't want to lug the bulk of one around unless I plan on taking photographs?

Re:Apple?

[Bing Tsher E]

You do realize that before there was Pocket PC anything, there was Palm OS, and that Microsoft tried to call it Palm PC until they were told they couldn't. Correct?

The 'evolution' didn't start inside the cell phone. It only moved there over time.

And in fact, it all kind of started with Apple's Newton. Which, uh, Steve Jobs shitcanned.

Re:Apple?

[N1AK]

No. Do I care if the phone offers the apps I want? Of course, these aren't just phones anymore, they're pocket PCs

Good job you don't want google voice or any other app that Apple arbitrarily decides against.

I have issues with my Android phone, but the only one that really bugged me was HTC's constant delaying of the OS update. I've got the apps I want (although admittedly evernote is better on iOS at the moment) and I'm re-assured by the fact that I'm free to select applications regardless of whether the phone manufacturer blesses them.

Re:Apple?

[jo42]

Based on the addition of blocks and Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) to iOS 4 several months ago, I predict that the 2nd generation iPad (which will be announced early next year) will be the first iDevice with a dual-core ARM CPU. Then Apple will plop that CPU into iPhone 5 by summer next year and iPod touch by fall next year.

Re:Apple?

[jonnat]

these aren't just phones anymore, they're pocket PCs

You are living in Apple's fantasy land. Unless you are able to install whatever app you want and to run your own code in your phone, it's not a computer what you have in your pocket.

Re:Apple?

[TheRaven64]

I'm a bit surprised that they weren't in there earlier. GCD is most useful on a mobile device because it provides a friendly wrapper around kqueue(), allowing you to spend a lot more time with the CPU in a low-power state.

Re:Apple?

[Neil Boekend]

Is that a camera in your pocket or are you happy to see me?

Re:Apple?

[Apple Acolyte]

Actually, even if that comment had been intended as humorous, Apple has been pushing speed and specs on the iPhone as an inducement to buy since the 3GS. Apple has set up an expectation that every new yearly iPhone release will be faster than the previous generation, so if Samsung has dual core cell phone chips coming I imagine Apple will be among the first to adopt them.

Re:Apple?

[Karlt1]

So what you're saying is that you want to pay your hard earned money for a PC that the developers will actively seek to prevent you from gaining root access on,

http://www.androidguys.com/2010/08/08/google-removes-easy-root-android-market/

who's apps can only come from one place

http://www.androidguys.com/2010/06/29/att-explains-opt-android-market/

(if those android game devs were deveoping on apple's platform they'd be SOL. On android they're free to set up their own market, distribute without a marketplace app or use one of the other marketplaces that already exists). And I've certainly heard enough horror stories about the review process to turn me off from ever trying to sell anything on the iphone.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars
http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts-total-2-of-app-stores-1b/

Re:Apple?

[cheesybagel]

Is it preemptive multitasking, or not? If it is not preemptive multitasking, it is not real multitasking.

Re:Apple?

[jedidiah]

Clearly many people don't give a crap about quality.

This is evidenced by their choice of phone as well as camera.

Luxury consumers indeed...

Re:Apple?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Is it preemptive multitasking, or not?

Yes, of course, it's Unix. Apple just puts barriers in the way of applications trying to do that. If you could somehow get out of the sandbox, you'd fine, but people like their sandboxes more than they want multitasking. iPhone sales would be different if this was a major barrier for average users.

If it is not preemptive multitasking, it is not real multitasking.

Preemptive multitasking, by definition, is just an approximation to real multitasking. With multi-core cpu's with embedded memory controllers we might be getting close to real multitasking, on PC's anyway.

Re:Apple?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Or did I miss an update where multitasking was invented and gifted to the world by Apple?

Only if you count Mach. Their 'gifts' in this area have been more focused on multiprocessing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch

Re:Apple?

[iamhassi]

"if those android game devs were deveoping on apple's platform they'd be SOL."

Um, Gameloft does make iPHone games, a lot of iPhone games, making $25 million from iPhone apps in 2009.

"I've certainly heard enough horror stories about the review process to turn me off from ever trying to sell anything on the iphone."

Sure there's a review process, but judging from how many apps make it obviously it's not bad, and with 200,000+ apps I'd be shocked if there wasn't somebody complaining about the process.

I'm sure you won't be missed, plenty of developers are becoming millionaires off iPhone apps, you don't have to be one of them. How many Android millionaires are there? After 2 years not one Android developer has made a million dollars from apps. In fact Android developers celebrate making "up to" 100k a year

Besides Android has it's own major problems, like a 24 hour return on apps: according to one Android developer, you can return any Android app for a full refund within 24 hours. Talk about fail, no wonder Android developers are broke when users can instantly download apps, use them, and then return it for a full refund and repeat the process anytime they want.

Sorry but Android is a joke, Google does not make money from Android while the iPhone is Apple's cash cow. If the iPhone vanished tomorrow Apple would be in serious pain, but if Android vanished tomorrow Google wouldn't even notice, so Apple will fight tooth-and-nail to make sure the iPhone maintains it's Jesusphone status while Google will continue to ignore Android.

Re:Apple?

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Not all apps have to go through the public App Store for iOS devices.

You can develop your own apps and distribute them within your corporate environment and not have them approved by Apple. You can distribute apps and update to devices over the air, by push or by asking employees to follow a link, you can even host the apps yourself. Apple even gives you the tools to do all of this.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/

I hope you found that informing.

Re:Apple?

[Shompol]

some of the largest Android game developers have boycott the Android Market.

Your linked article basically states that they tried to exercise their option of not using the android market and failed miserably. This is hardly the evidence against Android, as you are trying to present it.

Re:Apple?

[SimonTheSoundMan]

I fail to get your point – the iPhone 4 has the same CPU and GPU as they 3GS. They have just called it the 'A4' for marketing purposes.

The only real difference is the iPhone 4 has 512MB of RAM over the 256MB on the 3GS.

Re:Apple?

[Nursie]

Oh true.

I was just being snarky about iOS but Grand Central is something I mean to look into more. It sounds from a very quick skim of the material to be a decent thread-pool implementation but it created a bit more of a splash than that would warrant and, apple effect aside, so I must get around to figuring out what else is there.

Re:Apple?

[Nursie]

I've heard that the iPhone does the kill behaviour too.

Not to come across as too Fanboi-ish, but the N900 does it marvellously. Next step - Nokia, please make a slimmer,prettier Maemo/Meego phone? Please?

Re:Apple?

[Skuld-Chan]

Yes yes, Apple invented the ultimate smartphone - they set that trend, but since then they haven't done anything. They are slow to iterate hardware and software features unlike Google and their partners where there seems to be a new phone coming out or announced every single day (follow a site like Android Central - not really even exaggerating there).

On that boycott link - I found a bunch of "HD" (not sure what that means really in this case) games from gameloft on marketplace just doing a simple search on my Droid - I wonder how firm this policy is? Why are they boycotting the market? I'd suggest that the market (no pun intended) will sort things out - their sales will be lower because most users will get programs via the Android Marketplace since its pre-installed on every Google branded Android phone - there must people making money on there too - the amount of paid apps keeps increasing quickly.

Also there's at least one guy earning 10k a month from Google ads on his Android apps.

What I find funny is that everything the iPhone 4 added as a new feature Android has had either since launch (multi-tasking) or since 2.1 (almost a year now) and they are polished features (unlike my fucking Nokia) - they haven't set a single trend since the launch of the original iPhone honestly. I've actually heard on twitter and other places people looking for a better "more android like" notification system for their Jailbroken phones. Competition is only a good thing if your actually trying to be better than them.

Re:Apple?

[dfghjk]

"Touchscreen phones were pretty much non-existent outside of the Palm and a few Windows Mobile 6 phones until the iPhone came out..."

Outside of the Palm? Windows Mobile 6? Go ahead, bury your head in the sand. Touchscreens were ubiquitous on smartphones before Apple.

Re:Apple?

[stephanruby]

In fact some of the largest Android game developers have boycott the Android Market.

This interpretation is so misleading, it borders on libel. You're implying that game developers are avoiding the Android platform, when in fact, the actual content of the biased article you're pointing to is just showing the opposite. According to your article, at least one large well known game developer is choosing to port all of its iPhone HD games to Android and choosing to sell them on Android through its ***own*** very large distribution/marketing channel (without going through the Market except for one of its games).

That's hardly what I would call a boycott (especially, since Gameloft hasn't made any such statements). In fact in this particular case, take a look at the relationship that game company has with Samsung. Samsung is pushing Gameloft games like crazy. During the World Cup, in Europe at least, Samsung was pushing 'Real Football 2010' really hard. Now Samsung seems to be pushing 'Asphalt', another very good game of Gameloft (and not just on the Android platform, but also on its bada platform). And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the distribution/marketing agreements Gameloft has with Samsung (or even with a place like Game Stop) precluded them from distributing all of their games on the official Android Marketplace.

And that's the beauty of the Android platform as a Game Developer, if you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket, and be dependent on the changing mood swings and whims of only one ego-maniacal guy (who reserves the right to unilaterally change the terms of his distribution contract with you), you certainly don't have to. And if you have pre-existing relationships with very large game distributors/handset manufacturers/worldwide sports leagues/movie studios, where you'd like to have at least the option of being able to offer them some kind of distribution exclusivity in exchange for money/eye balls/marketing/whatever, Android doesn't prevent any of that.

Now speaking of boycotts, if you really want to know what a real boycott looks like or sounds like, just google iPhone and boycott. I already know of one Professor (a former well known iPhone developer) who tried launching a University-wide boycott against the iPhone (not that he succeeded), I'm pretty sure that you'll find thousands of such cases if you just search for them (not that you will, I'm pretty sure that you'll spend the rest of your day looking for cases, grasping at straws, that can only reinforce your point about developers boycotting Android. Good luck with that one).

Re:Apple?

[tepples]

Outside of the Palm? Windows Mobile 6?

Please see my reply to Anonymous Coward.

Re:Apple?

[Dr Max]

Your right palm os was around first, however i think pocket pcs were the first to get phone ability. Apple newton could of been cool with its fax and modem. Pitty it was about the same size of a low power laptop, and the hand writing recongnition was crap.

Re:Apple?

[dropadrop]

The N900 does seem nice. I have a few colleagues who got one and seem to feel most of the irritating bugs have been ironed out (I tested one a few months before release and at the time it was still very buggy).

A future Meego device could well be my next phone. The early developer versions seem like they are going closer and closer to the iPhone regarding the gui (which I consider an improvement).

I would expect the first devices to be about as burly as the N8 (the N9?), but I'm sure Nokia will be releasing quite a few phones with that OS if the reception is as warm as it should be.

Enlighten me please

[scsirob]

I have a hard time understanding how 1080p is such a great feature on screens 4" or smaller in diameter.
Most if not all have less pixels than 1920x1080, so how would this produce a better picture than 720p?

Re:Enlighten me please

[amRadioHed]

It seems they are talking about recording 1080p, not viewing 1080p. You don't have to view your recorded videos on the phone.

Re:Enlighten me please

[niftydude]

The key word is *recording*. Shoot 1080p on your phone - stream it to the nearest hd projector or tv.

Re:Enlighten me please

[dsanarco]

1080p on a smart phone screen is overkill, but it can output over hdmi to a screen capable of displaying 1080p

Re:Enlighten me please

[Wingman 5]

The advantage is your phone can have a HDMI out (there is even a mini spec to fit on a small device like a phone) to play at 1080p on your big screen.

Re:Enlighten me please

[LynnwoodRooster]

DNLA playback is what is important, here. Now you can store - and play back (wirelessly, if the phone is so equipped) - HD video from your phone. That's what you need the resolution for. External display playback.

Re:Enlighten me please

[advocate_one]

It seems they are talking about recording 1080p, not viewing 1080p. You don't have to view your recorded videos on the phone.

it would be nice to be able to play it back onto a hooked up TV straight after taking it... that still requires the device be able to playback 1080p, which is far easier than encoding it...

Re:Enlighten me please

[jrumney]

A crap cellphone lens is still just as crappy at 1080p as at 720p, in fact the higher resolution is more likely to enhance the flaws than at a lower resolution. 1080p on a cellphone is nothing more than a sales gimmick, just as 20Mpx on a compact camera is (or 5Mpx on a cellphone camera).

Re:Enlighten me please

[readthemall]

Yes, and add to this the battery that would be needed to power the dual-core processor ... Such batteries exist and are used widely in video and photo cameras, they just are big and not suitable for the slim smartphones.

I wonder when will come the day when we wold discuss a super-giga-mega-powered phone and somebody will say "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these".

Re:Enlighten me please

[mjwx]

I have a hard time understanding how 1080p is such a great feature on screens 4" or smaller in diameter.

The feature is important for 1080p output, combined with HDMI makes a phone compatible with most projectors, LCD/LED TV's and modern monitors. I can easily see myself walking in and displaying a video or presentation stored on my phone. Ideal for impromptu sales pitches or just bringing a movie over to a friends place.

Re:Enlighten me please

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Why can't my HD camcorder play games?
2. Streaming things from a phone is weird. Why, with full DRM, and online stores, wouldn't it make more sense for a token to be present in your account which enables streaming to multiple devices from the source and/or downloading for when on the go?

2a. Why would someone who keeps HD content on a phone and wishes to watch it on a TV have a problem with internet connectivity?
2b. The only really good use case I can think of is people using their phone a replacement for those DVD/BD binders. For all those times I just had to take my HD movie collection with me and jack into someone else's HD TV. So pretty much not most hotels, airplanes, bus, etc, and maybe the people I'm going to visit.

3?
I can completely understand the desire to stream stuff from a phone, just because you'll have something there eventually, and want to share it with others on a bigger screen, pics, movie, music, etc. BUT, HD content is going to waste so much space uselessly until you get to that HDTV. Your own will more than likely have better things to keep the media on in your own home, like a PC, PS3, XBox, the freaking disc, etc. So.. other people's HDTV. I don't get it.

Re:Enlighten me please

[pspahn]

I have a hard time understanding how 1080p is such a great feature on screens 4" or smaller in diameter.

You raise an interesting question, that which will likely be the next big paradigm in smart phones. Circular screens.

Re:Enlighten me please

[GNious]

Don't most modern TVs have USB port(s) and h.264 decoders? Why would you need your phone to do the decoding?!?

Re:Enlighten me please

[fnj]

What good is a delicate tiny miniaturized HDMI connector with a great stiff heavy hulking cable attached to it?

Re:Enlighten me please

[bhcompy]

While my Rolleiflex may have a $600 lens, cell phone cameras do not. They have a 30c piece of plastic and/or film over a very basic lens. As others have mentioned, there is no point in 1080p recording because the optics are terrible.

Re:Enlighten me please

[peppepz]

Why? Current phones' sensors have a much higher resolution than 720p, so they can use the extra detail to achieve lossless digital zoom. For example, the Nokia N8 can zoom "up to 3x" without interpolating pixels with this technique.

What's wrong with using this pixel abundance to shoot 1080p instead? There would still be enough pixels to allow for noise reduction.

Re:Enlighten me please

[gl4ss]

it's not a terribly great feature if you've hooked to a regular sized phone screen, but it is after you hook it up to 1080 screen. it's a somewhat good indicator about available memory bandwiths and processor power as well. it is a worthy thing to have on your press release about a new soc if it can do it or not though.

and this new samsung soc design will most definetely find it it's way into systems like next gen apple tv, plenty of samsung tv's and cheapo stb's.

and even with a crappy lens it's still better to record in 1080p if it's possible. and transcoding sucks.

Re:Enlighten me please

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

How does lossless digital zoom compensate for lens quality? As for noise reduction, wouldn't a lower resolution sensor of the same physical size be better than an algorithm?

Re:Enlighten me please

[vlueboy]

1080p on a cellphone is nothing more than a sales gimmick

It's irritatingly commendable that cellphone makers must create a market at 5 inch resolutions that doesn't even exist at 4 to 7 times that size for living room enjoyment.

Where the hell is our overdue 1080p on sub-40-inch TVs? The industry is holding out at the low end: If it wasn't for this 3D LCD fad, we'd sooner be seeing 20 inch TV's finally get 1080p so they, and classroom slide projectors can finally catch up to 15-year old desktop resolutions.

Re:Enlighten me please

[MartinSchou]

Where the hell is our overdue 1080p on sub-40-inch TVs?

On Google you lazy ass idiot.

Re:Enlighten me please

[vlueboy]

classroom slide projectors

Remove the word classroom and slide from there. I think those have always been analog. I meant to hilight how 640x480 and 800x600 plagued projectors so that college presentations meant for @ 1024x768 and higher were butchered because the prof had to manually lower resolutions just so they could be over-head projected for the class. This was sacrificing font clarity and screen real estate and seems to still be a problem on our more modern business Smartboards when the video source is on PC's and laptops designed around a native res of 1280x800.

Re:Enlighten me please

[mr_exit]

Except that they're shrinking the die size enough that these new dual core, 1.5Ghz + chips will use less power then the current Snapdragon ones.

Re:Enlighten me please

[hairyfish]

Because more pixels in a smaller footprint = lower quality. There's a reason good cameras are big. eg A 640x480 video from a dSLR will piss on anything in any res from any mobile phone.

Re:Enlighten me please

[peppepz]

How does lossless digital zoom compensate for lens quality?

I just meant it as an example of the fact that current phones' camera sensors do offer more pixels than is needed for 720p recording, so they use it for nice extra things such as digital zoom. So why couldn't the sensors of the near future use them for 1080p recording instead?

As for noise reduction, wouldn't a lower resolution sensor of the same physical size be better than an algorithm?

A lower resolution sensor, with the same S/N ratio, would capture less detail. Just dismissing higher resolution sensors as a marketing gimmick ignores the technical advancements in image sensors.

I suppose that higher resolution sensors are needed for still photography, where exposition times can be longer, the camera can be supposed to be still, and the captured image can be downloaded with no hurry from the sensor, so the noise is lower.
Movie filming just reuses the same sensor for a different purpose, where indeed a lower resolution sensor would be more adequate and cheaper, but then it would make the phone shoot worse photos. </speculation>

Re:Enlighten me please

[peppepz]

Whoops, it's probably "exposure" not "exposition". Sorry, not my language :P

Re:Enlighten me please

[lavaboy]

to hell with playing games. I want to know why my sneakers can't microwave my dinner. Who's working on that?

Re:Enlighten me please

[peppepz]

The point is that you can't have all the pixels if the movie resolution is limited to 720p. You lose them in the camera. We're talking about movies here, not photos.

Re:Enlighten me please

[Lonewolf666]

I think GP is talking about the fact that you only get the higher resolution with optics of matching quality. All optics have some inherent blurring, only the degree depends on quality (and with very high quality optics, you may run the diffraction limit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited)

So if you combine a high-resolution sensor with a second rate lens, all you achieve is that the blur where a sharp edge should be is spread across more pixels.
To some degree this is OK because it makes the image appear less blocky, and a later interpolation to get smooth edges becomes unneccessary. But I think at some point the higher resolution of the sensor is just wasted.

Re:Enlighten me please

[peppepz]

From what he says I understand that 5 megapixels on a cellphone are gimmick, no matter how expensive the phone is, because it's not technically possible to build a lens + sensor combination which is able to achieve a 5 megapixel still image in a smartphone form factor. Is there a physical law that dictates this? Aren't we well above the diffraction limit in current phone cameras?

Re:Enlighten me please

[readthemall]

And on the other side, shrinking the die size has limitations, in the same way like increasing the clock rate. You cannot do these things forever, Intel knows this very well when it comes to clock rates.

Re:Enlighten me please

[DJRumpy]

They are talking about recording and playback, not just recording alone.

It seems they are talking about recording 1080p, not viewing 1080p. You don't have to view your recorded videos on the phone.

From TFA:

Samsung said the processor will enable full HD video playback and recording at 1080p resolution, which is a huge step up from the 720p that is possible in today’s high-end smartphones. Also, we should remember that 1080p was a big challenge for mainstream desktop processors – and was not possible until the introduction of dual-core processors at the end of 2005 and capable discrete graphics cards at about the same time.

Re:Enlighten me please

[CProgrammer98]

Where the hell is our overdue 1080p on sub-40-inch TVs?

Umm on pretty much every new 32" tv? I searched a couple of companies in the UK and there's hundreds of 32" at 1080p

Re:Enlighten me please

[Lumpy]

As an owner of 1080p recording equipment, let me say that any phone that records 1080p will be a giant turd.

when you record at 1080p your lens quality becomes very important. even at 720p you can get away with the crappy NTSC lenses, but 1080p will show off bad glass right away.

1080p in a phone is a ragingly stupid thing. It's stupid in all the consumer camcorders t hat are under $1800.00 right now as well. (Nasty purple fringing and plain old awful lenses on these things coupled with really low recording bit-rates.

It's a marketing gimmick unless they have made HUGE advances in lens technology from just a week ago.

Re:Enlighten me please

[Lumpy]

Plus the encoding bitrate will be the same as the 720p mode so in fact the 1080p recording will actually be WORSE than the 720p recording.

Re:Enlighten me please

[mlk]

I wonder when will come the day when we wold discuss a super-giga-mega-powered phone and somebody will say "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these".

Passed that point now.

Re:Enlighten me please

[jedidiah]

> I have a hard time understanding how 1080p is such a great feature on screens 4" or smaller in diameter.

Your device doesn't need special files created only for it.

Imagine if your iPod had to have specially degraded 16kb audio files and was unable
to play the full quality/bitrate files that you use for your PC or your home stereo.

Everyone (including you) would consider that terribly lame and completely unacceptable.

Re:Enlighten me please

[jedidiah]

> 2b. The only really good use case I can think of is people using their phone a replacement for those DVD/BD binders

This is a geek/tech site and you people can't imagine the usefulness of having a no-muss/no-fuss device that
you can use as a portable video player to carry around any of your personal video content and play it wherever
you might go (especially if you are off the grid)?

Is this Slashdot? Or did I stumble onto a crochet website?

Re:Enlighten me please

[Fishchip]

You're absolutely right, I can't wait to play back last night's drunken escapades on my big screen TV.

Re:Enlighten me please

[drsmithy]

It wouldn't.

Not having to keep transcoding every video I have would be a definitely plus, however, as would being able to plug it into a 60" TV.

Re:Enlighten me please

[amRadioHed]

Who says? Isn't that up to whatever you're running on the phone?

Re:Enlighten me please

[SimonTheSoundMan]

USB isn't a good for streaming, it would fall over with Bluray.

Streaming like this has been tried before, example being Sony and i.LINK (really is Firewire 400).

Re:Enlighten me please

[SimonTheSoundMan]

It may not be interpolating the pixels, however you will loose resolution because you have to low pass filter and anti-alias because you have a bayer pattern matrix sensor. Because you have 4M effective pixels doesn't mean you get 4M pixels of resolution.

Take the Red One cine camera. I have tested it, it has a 4k sensor, however the resolution is close 3.2k after de-bayering and filtering, at best. The Red camera looks blurry at 3.2k too. The Sony F35 is a 5k chip but it samples down to 2k and makes a very sharp image. The Red camera is good when scaled down to 2k as well.

http://www.definitionmagazine.com/journal/2009/12/1/why-i-bought-a-sony-f35-cinematography-camera-by-dan-mulliga.html

Re:Enlighten me please

[Lonewolf666]

OK, let's do some math (if only an approximation), based on Wikipedia. Let us assume that
-the formula sin(theta) = 1.220 * (lambda/D) from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution is a good approximation for the diffraction limit, theta being the angular resolution in radians
-lambda=500nm (visible light, green tending to blue)
-Aperture size D=2mm, based on the webcam on the notebook I have here. Let's pretend this is typical for a smartphone camera.

Then sin(theta) = 1.220 * 500nm / 2mm = 1.22 * 2.5 *(1/10,000) = 3.05/10,000.
For small values of theta and a bit more rounding we get theta = 3/10,000 or 6.5 arc minutes for diffraction limited optics.

Now lets assume a camera with 30 degree field of view on the x-axis and a sensor with 2500 pixels along that axis. In that camera, each pixel would be responsible for covering 30/2500 = 0.012 degrees or in 0.5/2,500 = 2/10,000 in radians = 4.3 arc minutes. Compared to the diffraction limit, I'd say that sensor pushes the limits of what makes sense with that aperture size, assuming a very high quality lens.

Now consider that a typical smart phone won't have the best possible optics for cost reasons, and 5 megapixels on a cellphone are gimmick ;-)

Re:Enlighten me please

[MightyYar]

That same die shrink could have been used the power efficiency to extend life or make the battery smaller... so there still is some merit in his comment, even if the idea of a Samsung with a camcorder battery is absurd.

Re:Enlighten me please

[tepples]

nor do current phones have the ability to store 20GB movies.

There are 32 GB microSDHC cards. And here's the big secret: when they talk about "movies", they're not always talking about feature-length Hollywood works. QuickTime calls any video file a "movie", even if it's only 2 minutes long.

Re:Enlighten me please

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

It's partly optics and the law of diffraction and it's partly because with current sensor technology, all other things being equal, a higher pixel count means more noise. MP count should be part of a design spec that takes into account other sensor variables, the lens to be used, and the environment/use of the camera. I'm not sure exactly what the limit is for most camera phones, as it would obviously vary, but it seems like 5MP is enough for the sensor size and optics than most camera phones use. There are many areas that image quality in small camera phones can be increased, but pixel count is one area we don't need to pursue any further for the moment unless there is a major change to the way cameras are designed.

LG is releasing a series of dual-core smartphones

[angry tapir]

LG's new Optimus line will include smartphones running on Nvidia's Tegra 2 dual-core chips.

Screw smartphones, how about a new NSLU2

[rubies]

...with one of those bad boys in it. And an eSata interface. All your home server problems solved!

Re:Screw smartphones, how about a new NSLU2

[White Flame]

"Plug computing" ((c) Marvell) is the successor of that direction. There's stuff like this hitting the market, though still single-core for now.

Once these new Cortex A9s are more in the wild, I'd expect them to find a home in the wall wart machines as well.

Re:Screw smartphones, how about a new NSLU2

[drsmithy]

...with one of those bad boys in it. And an eSata interface. All your home server problems solved!

My home server "problems" involve a hell of a lot more disk space than can be attached to one of those things.

Not dual core. More RAM!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can watch amazing 1080p on a 4.5" screen. My cinema experience is now complete.

Smart phones don't need dual core. They need more RAM.

App designers are guaranteed certain resources when the application runs on a phone. This is why a single-tasking paradigm was popular, because it simply guaranteed these resources. Multitasking requires sharing of memory. Without swap space enabled, memory may run out quickly. Android has mechanisms for saving a program's state and killing off the least-recently-used application. Recalling the application reloads the saved state information within a fresh process. The iPhone just added multitasking, but not all apps can work with it.

Re:Not dual core. More RAM!

[bemymonkey]

Yep, I have ~400MB available on my Desire (576MB in there total according to the spec sheets), and it's still not enough.

My old Milestone (256MB RAM) was constantly killing off applications in the background because it was running out of RAM, sometimes not even saving the app states properly, causing me to lose my place (doesn't sound too bad, but it gets annoying quickly)... my Desire fares better, but there's still the occasional low memory kill when I have a lot of browser tabs open.

What I want is a gigabyte or two of RAM and swap on SLC NAND... *drools*

Re:Not dual core. More RAM!

[TheRaven64]

ARM's latest designs for the server segment implement something a bit like PAE, so they can address more than 4GB of physical memory, although you're still constrained to 'only' 4GB per process (not yet a major limitation - on my 64-bit laptop, none of my processes currently use more than 1.5GB).

The problem is power. RAM is one of those things that has to remain powered constantly. Until we have something like MRAM or PCRAM that only need power to change state, the power used by your memory is proportional to the amount of memory that you have. This means that you end up with shorter battery life the more RAM you have. You also need more space and cooling. A lot o current phones use package-on-package (PoP) modules for RAM, where the RAM clips onto the top of the CPU. This means that you don't need any motherboard traces for RAM (saving space), but the heat that the RAM chips can generate is severely limited. Currently, these modules go up to 512MB. If you want to add more RAM, you need another chip on the motherboard, which takes space, uses power, and generates heat. None of these are good things in a mobile device.

Re:Not dual core. More RAM!

[jbeaupre]

Just a random thought, but smartphones could be the first place we see memristor memory. ~1 GHz switching speeds, high bit density (current prototypes are 100 Gbit/cm2), and power proportional to read/writes instead of quantity. And a customer base willing to pay a premium. I'm hard pressed to think of another larger volume use with as good a fit.

Killer feature.

[RightSaidFred99]

And by killer, I mean battery killer.

I think smartphones need to go back to basics. I'd take a smartphone that lasted 4 days of normal use on a single charge anytime over a new one that does shit I don't really need anyway 10% (or even 30%) faster.

Once they've got battery life back under control, get back on performance.

Re:Killer feature.

[davester666]

Fine. So you're a member of the 1% of all cellphone users that doesn't regularly connect their phone to their TV to watch HD movies.

Maybe you should try joining the rest of us in the 21st century, with chargers at home, at the office and in our cars!

Re:Killer feature.

[sznupi]

Not necessarily; some tests by ARM/Symbian/Nokia strongly suggest that a n-core chip of x frequency is a good way to get considerable energy savings over a singlecore chip of n*x frequency. Of course whether or not it would be used that way is another thing...

Re:Killer feature.

[Com2Kid]

p>I think smartphones need to go back to basics.

So you want a basic cellphone then? :P

Re:Killer feature.

[pedestrian crossing]

you're a member of the 1% of all cellphone users that doesn't regularly connect their phone to their TV to watch HD movies

Did you mistype, or are you really claiming that 99% of all cellphone users regularly connect their phone to their TV to watch TV?

Or is this a "whoooooosh" moment for me?

Re:Killer feature.

[bemymonkey]

Battery life is fine if you keep the screen off. I get a standby power draw of roughly 5mA on average on my Desire. That works out to about 280h of standby time, and that's with a bunch of always-connected applications (Google Sync always active, an IM client, SIP client) in the background, and WiFi and Bluetooth on. Turn all that stuff off and I get values more around 3mA... 466h.

Obviously a screen that draws almost 100x as much (seriously, at full power the AMOLED screen draws close to 300mA!) is going to kill off the battery very quickly.

In comparison, the SoC uses very little power (full CPU load on the Desire's Snapdragon is 40mA higher than idle - tested with SetCPU's stress test) and scales very well with load. If you really want to increase use time, build more efficient screens... fuck the processor.

Re:Killer feature.

[pspahn]

Certainly a woosh.

OTOH, when I bought my Evo, I read plenty about the poor battery performance. Not a big deal, I thought, as I didn't buy it because I make a lot of calls, and figured that I would have some buffer to work with because so.

Unfortunately, what I didn't necessarily predict, is that I would be using wifi tethering as much as I do. This eats up battery pretty quickly. I bring my netbook to all sorts of places so that I am not tied down with school, and can work on and turn in assignments even when on a fishing trip in Wyoming.

The consequence is that I now bring my USB cable damn near everywhere I go. It is pretty compact and fits in a thigh pocket without issue, but it does give me a sense of still being wired even though I'm not supposed to be. My brother, who also got an Evo after seeing mine (he's an early 20's iThing convert), opted for the macho aftermarket battery for $60 and I have to say, I think I'd like the same. What I'd really like to get, however, is a decent solar charging backup battery I can clip on my backpack so that I always have some extra juice when I need it. And after searching around for the right answer, I've concluded that everything is either a cheapo solution that won't last, or is still quite overpriced.

Ultimately, I always have my portable jump-start/air compressor/radio/roadside hazard light battery thingy that has a USB port to rely on.

Re:Killer feature.

[fnj]

Wow, I want these new cellphone chips in notebooks and network attached devices! They are far ahead of the watt sucking crap from Intel and AMD.

Re:Killer feature.

[Anonymous Coward]

What he said, with the exception of "smart".

I want something like what Nokia 1100 was. Just a basic cell phone with two weeks battery life, not expensive, perfect for calling people. So easy that even my great-grandmother could use it. And if you lost it, you just bought new one for 25 euros.

Re:Killer feature.

[bemymonkey]

Well, they ARE already partially available in NAS type devices. As a matter of fact, the cheapo Buffalo LinkStation Lite I have sitting out in the hall runs on an ARM chip of some sort, IIRC...

Smartbooks and tablets are starting to run on ARM as well. Shouldn't be too long until your wishes are granted ;)

Re:Killer feature.

[syousef]

Battery life is fine if you keep the screen off. I get a standby power draw of roughly 5mA on average on my Desire. That works out to about 280h of standby time, and that's with a bunch of always-connected applications (Google Sync always active, an IM client, SIP client) in the background, and WiFi and Bluetooth on. Turn all that stuff off and I get values more around 3mA... 466h.

Obviously a screen that draws almost 100x as much (seriously, at full power the AMOLED screen draws close to 300mA!) is going to kill off the battery very quickly.

In comparison, the SoC uses very little power (full CPU load on the Desire's Snapdragon is 40mA higher than idle - tested with SetCPU's stress test) and scales very well with load. If you really want to increase use time, build more efficient screens... fuck the processor.

So what you're saying is that if you never actually look at your phone, or use it as a phone, you can run idle applications in the background. Colour me impressed.

Re:Killer feature.

[bemymonkey]

Correct. That's why I never manage more than 12 hours on a single charge, and carry around an external USB power pack with a 4400mAh LiIon battery in it...

The gist of what I was trying to say was, however, that the CPU is NOT the component that draws so much power on smartphones, but rather the screen, and to a lesser effect (contrary to popular belief) the radios.

Re:Killer feature.

[bemymonkey]

True, but then you wouldn't be able to receive calls ;)

Just saying, the screen is (in most use cases) the component that draws the most power, usually by far. Manufacturers need to stop screwing around optimizing power draw for when the phone is idle with the display off, but rather make it so that it'll last 24 full hours with the screen ON!

WTF do I need 200+ hours of standby time for if after using the phone for 6 hours heavily it's completely dead?

Re:Killer feature.

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Battery life is fine if you keep the screen off. I get a standby power draw of roughly 5mA on average on my Desire. That works out to about 280h of standby time, and that's with a bunch of always-connected applications (Google Sync always active, an IM client, SIP client) in the background, and WiFi and Bluetooth on. Turn all that stuff off and I get values more around 3mA... 466h.

Obviously a screen that draws almost 100x as much (seriously, at full power the AMOLED screen draws close to 300mA!) is going to kill off the battery very quickly.

In comparison, the SoC uses very little power (full CPU load on the Desire's Snapdragon is 40mA higher than idle - tested with SetCPU's stress test) and scales very well with load. If you really want to increase use time, build more efficient screens... fuck the processor.

So what you're saying is this new dual core processor will be great for watching 1080p movies with the screen off (or on an e-ink screen) ?

Re:Killer feature.

[bemymonkey]

No, I'm saying that given the same other hardware, this processor won't affect battery life negatively in a very noticable way.

Battery life is already crap, and it's not because of the processors used. All this power optimization should be taking place where it's needed most... crappy AMOLED screens with twice the power draw of LCD when displaying anything remotely useful (i.e. not a mostly black screen), for instance.

Re:Killer feature.

[Pentium100]

You can get them now, but bigger batteries will make your phone heavier, and of course nobody can lift 200 grams without a forklift or a crane.

Re:Killer feature.

[julesh]

Wow, I want these new cellphone chips in notebooks and network attached devices! They are far ahead of the watt sucking crap from Intel and AMD.

There are a number of cheap chinese manufacturers producing netbooks with this kind of processor. I have one based on a (2-generations-old) ARM926, which has a max power rating of about 0.5mW. Just look for cheap ARM netbooks on ebay, you'll find loads.

Re:Killer feature.

[bytestorm]

Power usage has always been a function of frequency squared. n*A*x will pretty much always beat A*(n*x)^2. To see advantages from your statement though, we would have to make current chips dual core with half the frequency. You won't get energy savings from adding an additional core at the same clock frequency.

Re:Killer feature.

[Belial6]

I want a notebook that is just a keyboard, monitor and battery pack with an indentation for my phone to become the mousepad. My phone is already powerful enough to be a general purpose computer. No, it isn't powerful enough to replace my desktop, but for most of the kinds of things that I do with my laptop, it would do just fine.

Re:Killer feature.

[Narishma]

They've been "starting to run on ARM" for two years now and we still can't buy them.

Re:Killer feature.

[Jonboy X]

Here ya go. I used this to power my G1 while I was down in the Grand Canyon this summer.
http://www.scosche.com/products/productID/1905

There was no T-Mo signal, but was using the GPS.

Re:Killer feature.

[Joe Snipe]

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-Solar-USB-charger-simple/

Design your own specs and be done with it.

Re:Killer feature.

[pspahn]

Cool, but that does nothing for the netbook. I am not very electrically savvy, but I'm sure it could be adopted for 12v output, yes?

Re:Killer feature.

[Joe Snipe]

It's dependent on the output of the solar cell. Instructables.com has quite a few of these how-to's, look for one that offers 12v. You could pick up one of these and some Velcro and be in business, however I imagine you would still need to rig some form of connector, and most likely a voltage regulator. plus you still wouldn't be able to plug the netbook right into it, as a solar panel does a trickle charge, rather than a steady wattage to the device. You would need to plug the battery into the device (which probably means having two batteries)

Re:Killer feature.

[bytta]

Actually - this raises another question:
Why the hell aren't companies making headless Linux servers using these processors?

A 1GHz processor drawing max 40 mAh means that such a device at full load uses less than one Watt a day! (for the CPU)

That's a couple of orders of magnitude over the current wall-wart Linux devices available today...

Not like qualcomm this has a proper gpu

[Dr Max]

Dual core 1 ghz chip with 1080p graphics, I’m pretty sure they followed NVIDIA and the tegra 2. By followed I mean they took a tegra 2 told NVIDIA they were going to make tegra 2 Samsung phones, but instead dumped them a few months latter. Only now to come out with a very similar chip but coincidently fixed a few of the tegra problems (bigger memory cache).

Nokia also uses ARM 11

[G3ckoG33k]

"Apple, which is generally believed to have the most capable processor in the market today"

Huh? I thought Apple used the same processor, ARM 11, as Nokia.

Re:Nokia also uses ARM 11

[tokul]

Huh? I thought Apple used the same processor, ARM 11, as Nokia.

Apple sticker hides second CPU core.

Re:Nokia also uses ARM 11

[Slur]

iPhone 4, iPod Touch gen.4, iPad, and Apple TV gen.2 all use the Apple A4 processor, which is an ARM+GPU manufactured by Samsung.

Re:Nokia also uses ARM 11

[Fjandr]

Lies! Apple puts the second core in the sticker!

Re:Nokia also uses ARM 11

[Senjutsu]

ARM 11 isn't a processor, it is an ISA designation

Re:Nokia also uses ARM 11

[iJed]

The last iPhone to have an ARM 11 was the 3G. They have been Cortex A8 based since the 3GS.

Re:Nokia also uses ARM 11

[TheRaven64]

Nope. ARM11 is ARM's two-generations-ago, implementing the ARMv6 instruction set (confused yet?). The iPhone, like pretty much every other high-end smartphone, uses the Cortex A8 core, which replaced the ARM11 at the top end. ARM11 is used for cheaper devices - Samsung sells a lot of them, because they are much cheaper than the A8. The iPhone uses Apple's A4 chip, manufactured by Samsung, which uses an unmodified Cortex A8 core and a small number of other components. The only thing that makes the A4 interesting is that it omits a lot of hardware that most A8 SoCs include (stuff that Apple didn't need). This made it cheaper to manufacture, and may have slightly reduced power consumption, but it definitely doesn't make it the most capable processor. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Obligatory XKCD

[CrazyJim1]

1080p

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[hitmark]

It's funny how that one may well have sprouted one of the longest forum threads, yet is the least scientific of the lot. I guess the threshold for opinion on that topic was just low enough for anyone to hold one.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[readthemall]

True, both about the comic and the corresponding forum thread. When it comes to imaging (video/photo), most geeks fall in the "Equipment Measurbator" and "Online Expert" categories, as defined in The Seven Levels of Photographers.

Re:Should really be called "half-battery-life"

[gmuslera]

There are reasons for doing cpu intensive things (even if not particulary 1080p video) in a portable device of the size of a phone that you carry as much as your phone. But you are right that battery is a problem. Something that should have hopely days of autonomy could have a few hours using a powerful cpu, apps that take advantage of it, and a big, bright and colorful touchscreen unless using a high capacity battery. Before adding even more power hungry capabilities to phones some optimization on the power part should be done

The most capable mobile processor

[stephanruby]

Apple, which is generally believed to have the most capable processor in the market today, may be under pressure to roll out a dual-core iPhone next year as well.

This is silly. Apple is using Samsung's processor, an OEM version of the Hummingbird (which is not exclusively sold to Apple by any means). So if anyone has "the most capable [mobile] processor in the market today" (and even that statement could be debated), it's Samsung (certainly not Apple).

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[teh31337one]

A4 has a PowerVR SGX535 GPU, which can push 28 million triangles/sec whilst the Galaxy S has a PowerVR SGX540 GPU that pushes 90 million triangles/sec.

http://bit.ly/bM3JeK note: the article lists iPhone 3gs at 7 million triangles/sec with 28m deleted, but IIRC it's actually the other way around. (7m rumoured, but it was actually 28m)

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[gl4ss]

heheheh.

distortion field - the gpu isn't apples, neither are any part on the soc they call A4. it's just a marketing diversion. a more truthful way would be to say that it's apples codename for the chip they're currently buying. much like g4 was a marketing term attached to some cpu's apple bought from elsewhere earlier, it didn't make them apple designed cpu's.

there's other "but"'s that could be attached to it, but none of them really change the fact that anyone with cash could order chips pretty much exactly like apples batch of a4's, straight from sammy.

fabbing is the hard part anyways.

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[hitmark]

Integrating a GPU is not unusual in the ARM world. It's how they save physical space to make these small but powerful devices. These days they usually throw in a programmable DAP to handle audio and video (unless your shopping rock bottom, like say rockchip, where the codec support is fixed) and perhaps also wireless of various kinds (Samsungs latest announcement even holds GPS support on the same silicon).

At best, Apple may have played around with the power management design of the SoC. But i am willing to bet it is for all intents a rebranded samsung (but the rebranding allows Apple to up the mystery factor).

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[GauteL]

"Apple is using Samsung's processor"

Not quite that simple. Both the Apple A4 and Samsung's own version (which seem to be practically the same chips (*)) were co-developed by Samsung and Intrinsity and Intrinsity was absorbed by Apple earlier this year.

So technically, they are using processors which are co-developed between them (and manufactured by Samsung).

(*) Samsung has upgraded the PowerVR part in their version of the chip for the Galaxy S.

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[UnknowingFool]

Halfway correct. Apple is using a processor built by Samsung but it's not an OEM version. The A4 is a custom processor designed by Apple. There doesn't seem to be anything revolutionary about the A4; it is however highly customized.

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[LWATCDR]

Thanks for the post.
The current Samsung line seems to have the best GPU performance by far in the smart phone market. Problem is that right now very few programs use it.
But yea Apple probably could have made that claim last month but not today.

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[dfghjk]

You need a lesson on what constitutes a CPU.

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[alexo]

A4 has a PowerVR SGX535 GPU, which can push 28 million triangles/sec whilst the Galaxy S has a PowerVR SGX540 GPU that pushes 90 million triangles/sec.

Unfortunately, it has half the battery life of the A4.

Still waiting for a smartphone that is powerful, has good battery life and has a physical keyboard.

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[teh31337one]

My i9000 (European Galaxy S variant) had very poor battery life on the stock firmware. After updating it to newer firmware (leaked beta firmware from www.samfirmware.com) my battery life has improved immensely.

I'm not sure what gsmarena did, but they got very impressive results when they were reviewing the Galaxy S. http://bit.ly/d7AmWA

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[alexo]

My i9000 (European Galaxy S variant) had very poor battery life on the stock firmware. After updating it to newer firmware (leaked beta firmware from www.samfirmware.com) my battery life has improved immensely.

How significantly?

I'm not sure what gsmarena did, but they got very impressive results when they were reviewing the Galaxy S.

Yet most commenters challenge their result (the word "bulshit" is tossed around).

Anand's methodology is usually solid, he does comparative reviews so there's context.

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[teh31337one]

I don't keep 3G on, and the battery will last around 36 hours with average usage. While idling with background sync on, it uses around 1% an hour.

Re:The most capable mobile processor

[alexo]

I don't keep 3G on, and the battery will last around 36 hours with average usage. While idling with background sync on, it uses around 1% an hour.

I do not dispute your experience. However, your usage patterns are not comparable to those that Anand used to compare battery life on different phone.

That is, if you were to get an iPhone and use it for several days in exactly the same way that you use your Galaxy S, then you would have a valid basis for comparison.

Re:Should really be called "half-battery-life"

[Entropius]

What is considered CPU-intensive? I'm sure people could say the same about netbooks, but I develop 10MP raw images on mine. Works just fine, but a little slow.

Yes but the tech press loves Apple

[Sycraft-fu]

If you haven't noticed, everything Apple does is always "brilliant" and "innovative" according to the tech press. Doesn't matter if they are releasing something that is the same as everything else. For example the Apple TV gets praise lavished on it as an amazing on-demand streaming device, even though nearly every Blu-ray player with an ethernet port also does streaming and, of course, plays DVDs and Blu-rays on top of that.

For that matter, it might even be Apple PR copied verbatim. It is amazing how many press agencies will just reprint PR copy that the like. A PR firm will send out the "OMG t3h new stuffs!" memo, as PR firms do, and sites will pick it up and regurgitate a good bit of it verbatim.

Re:Yes but the tech press loves Apple

[mjwx]

For that matter, it might even be Apple PR copied verbatim. It is amazing how many press agencies will just reprint PR copy that the like. A PR firm will send out the "OMG t3h new stuffs!" memo, as PR firms do, and sites will pick it up and regurgitate a good bit of it verbatim.

After that Apple will write benchmark for Anandtech who will publish it without question.

I instantly know when I hear things like "Snappier", "User Experience", "Superior UI" and "responsive/ness" that the poster has absolutely no clue and is just regurgitating Apple marketing.

Re:Yes but the tech press loves Apple

[pspahn]

Totally OT, but I remember visiting Anandtech when the kid was still in high school and thinking, wow, what a bright young dude. The last time I was there, however, it seems as though it's nothing but a bunch of what you just mentioned.

Sorry, though, I don't even have a lawn.

Re:Yes but the tech press loves Apple

[mjwx]

Totally OT,

Probably a bit but I've never seen one of his tests replicated. Plus he tends to leave out a lot of factors (such as the starting and ending dBm for the "Death Grip" tests he did).

Sorry, though, I don't even have a lawn.

I used to, then the housemate killed it (lawns do use a lot of water and need a lot of maintenance). However if it makes you feel better you can get off my woodchips.

Re:Yes but the tech press loves Apple

[Vegemeister]

That, or they're using Windows XP and they just disabled the swap file.

Re:but iphone cant even run 2 apps at the same tim

[Anonymous Coward]

Maintain the Reality Distortion Field.

Samsung has a better processor than Apple

[Boycott BMG]

Apple, which is generally believed to have the most capable processor in the market today

The processor in the Galaxy S line of phones (Samsung Captivate, Vibrant, Epic 4G, whatever Verizon wants to call theirs) is basically a newer version of the one in the iPhone 4. It has the same CPU (1GHz ARM Cortex A8) and a better GPU (PowerVR SGX 535 vs 540).

Re:Samsung has a better processor than Apple

[teh31337one]

A4 is also underclocked to 700-800mhz on the iPhone.

Tablet/Dock

[HRbnjR]

I want one of these, with the ability to: 1) Connect it to a Mouse/Keyboard/Monitor to act as a desktop via HDMI/USB/Bluetooth/whatever. 2) Dock it into a 10" touchscreen to act as a tablet.

Re:hm

[hvm2hvm]

And maybe played by the phone itself? I know, it's a craaaazy idea but some people might actually want that...

Re:hm

[peppepz]

You can play the content over HDMI. All new high-end phones have a HDMI output.

Given the restrictions ...

[2Bits]

...on the phone by the manufacturers and carriers, what's the whole point of having that much power? Recording and watching 1080p video? Pfft....the lack of imagination is pathetic. I have a tons of apps that I'd like to work on, if the phone platform is as open as the PC platform. Laptops just don't have the mobility and form/shape required for a ubiquitous interaction.

I just wish there are more manufacturers put out more high-end mobility devices for the MeeGo platform. Can't wait to get my hand on the N900's successor.

Misplaced Priorities

[jgdobak]

We're all worried about smartphone CPUs that can decode 1080p video when none of them have screens that can display it.

Stop and think about it for a minute.

Marketspeak has totally infiltrated discussion about display resolutions and I am branded as an idiot when I bring up that 720p involves a lot more than 720 vertical pixels, and that progressive scan doesn't mean shit on LCDs to begin with.

I would love to be proven wrong here, but I have no idea why progressive v. interlaced is even brought up anymore. It's an artifact of the CRT age of displays and needs to die. I had a look at the Wikipedia page on display resolutions the other day and it listed 230*200 and similar as "interlaced" and others as "progressive." It makes no sense anymore. Let it die.

Re:Misplaced Priorities

[hitmark]

HDMI or displayport out? you will likely find more and more products with this port: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDMI

Consider, where before, only apple could show having a singular port, now all may have so. End result, you can dock any device to any tv without worrying about carrying the right cable. Should make parties more interesting, i suspect.

Misleading Headline?

[GaneshAnandTech]

Unfortunately, the dual core CPU has got almost nothing to do with the 1080p encode or decode. These are handled by dedicated IPs (pre-designed blocks which are slotted into the chip) from companies like Imagination Technologies and Chips & Media. They would work as well with an single core Cortex-A8 as they do with the Cortex-A9.

Re:Misleading Headline?

[Jeppe Salvesen]

You are right regarding video playback. However, if the CPU is set to do "real work" for 1080p displays, then adding a core is a good thing.

Also, this trend of ever faster ARM platforms is interesting for the netbook market. Intel Atom is probably consciously crippled in order to avoid it eating market share from their more profitable "upmarket" processors. However, these ARM producers are indeed competing to make their processors ever faster. On a two-year perspective, Intel may find it's lowend offerings being threatened by new platforms. The iPad is just the beginning.

Re:Misleading Headline?

[Daniel Phillips]

this trend of ever faster ARM platforms is interesting for the netbook market

Sadly, I presume it also means "ever hotter" and "ever more power hungry" as it has for the desktop market. I would much prefer "same power draw and but more throughput", however I may not be the typical consumer.

Re:Misleading Headline?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Intel Atom is probably consciously crippled in order to avoid it eating market share from their more profitable "upmarket" processors

Huh? So an Atom could be as fast as their desktop chips, but they keep their desktop parts artificially consuming 10x as much power and lose desktop business to AMD for it ... to protect their desktop market?

Isn't it more likely that low-power chips have fewer transistors at a lower clock speed to keep the power low and so they're slower? I'm typing this on the best low-power Atom available this past spring and it is slow, but I care about the 6 hours of real battery life under Fedora more than the speed - on this particular machine.

It's also about maths

[VincenzoRomano]

1920x1080 pixels x24 bit depth x30 fps ~= 1.4Gbps.
I wonder whether multiple cores are enough or you maybe need something like DMA or a data crossbar into the hw architecture as well as whether the current SD cards can cope at that pace ...

Re:It's also about maths

[Chrisq]

There are "high speed SD cards" that some camcorders need

Re:It's also about maths

[Chrisq]

Of course what I missed is your assumption that they are storing uncompressed 1080p on the card. Nobody does that, it would be compressed greatly by H.264 or a similar codec.

Re:It's also about maths

[peppepz]

Nobody but the camera module would see that stream *uncompressed*. Just handling it would probably kill a Core i7, let alone h264-compressing it on the fly.

Re:It's also about maths

[VincenzoRomano]

Not storing ... transfering from the CCD to the compression engine.
Compression, I understand, is mandatory for storage because of external memory bandwidth constraints ...

Re:It's also about maths

[VincenzoRomano]

... you mean the h.264 compression is done into the CCD?
If it's run into any of the CPUs/GPUs, then the stream needs to be transfered to the CPU/GPU RAM ... at 1.4Gbps!

Re:It's also about maths

[peppepz]

No, I think the CCD feeds the stream using some proprietary bus to some ASIC, and this one makes the compressed frames available to application CPUs via some kind of DMA. I think this, because not even desktop CPUs can compress 1080p h.264 in realtime, and we're talking about a phone here.

Re:It's also about maths

[VincenzoRomano]

... and an ASIC (very likely an ASSP) is capable of 1.4Gbps IN + compression + (let's imagine) 10 Mbps OUT throughput?
Interesting ...

Re:It's also about maths

[peppepz]

See for yourself, I've not found much Qualcomm information but Texas Instruments publishes a lot of documentation about their smartphone platforms.

From a quick read of the user quide I see that their OMAP3 platform apparently has two modules for the camera interface; a "Camera ISP" module which fetches data from the CCD in raw, yuv, rgb or jpeg format, and a "IVA" module, which appears to be a DSP with hardcoded functionality for mainstream codecs but can also be programmed for what they call "emerging" codecs. This module can then DMA its output to the application CPU module. All the cores are on the same SOC and are interconnected with two Sonics buses, one of which must bear the bandwidth of the data coming from the sensor.

What's impressive is that there is much less hardcoded logic involved than one might think. The OMAP4 leaflet claims its IVA core can deliver 30fps 1080p encoding and decoding for h.264 hp, mpeg4 asp, vc-1 ap, mpeg2 mp and on2 vp7.

Re:It's also about maths

[doogledog]

you maybe need something like DMA

Its a safe bet that this chip has DMA capabilities for most, if not all of its built in peripherals. Otherwise you're left to perform interrupt or polling based data transfers which just wouldn't let it get anything done.
I don't know this for a fact, but I'd say that all chips in this class have DMA capabilities. A few ARM chips now seem to have quite flexible DMA that allows for BitBlt operations which can be quite handy.

Where to get data from + Re:Tablet/Dock

[leuk_he]

Well, a 10" touchscreen is not the point. The point is that you want to connect it to ANY 45" TV via a hdmi link. You got to have a little bit of imagination there. couple it to a blue tooth mouse and aBT keyboard and a power adapter and youhave a mobile work station.

However if you want to use it for media player, the market speaks forgets that not every 1080p is equal. The main problem is: how to get data INTO the phone. a HD blueray iamge is 40GB. With current SD card storage you can load one of such 1080p movie and the mobile device is full? A NAS is not the solution because streaming 1080p content over wireless is pushing all limits.

In other words: tell what bitrate 1080p content is supported. It is easy to get 24fps 1080p with black screens, but with fast moving action a lot of platforms are stretched.

Re:Where to get data from + Re:Tablet/Dock

[hitmark]

Is that in MPEG2 or MPEG4? Iirc, BR stayed with 2 because the greater space allowed it to (tho it also could use 4 and VC1 or something like that) vs HD-DVD where they needed to go 4 to get the greater compression.

And funny enough, the industry seems to finally having agreed on a common port that matches the capabilities of what apple have on their portable products. As such, one may in the future use a single dock for multiple devices. This including "desktops" at home or office for the phone.

Re:Where to get data from + Re:Tablet/Dock

[the_crowbar]

Blu-ray discs can be MPEG2, VC1, or H.264 encoding. No recent releases I have seen have used MPEG2 for the main movie though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Codecs

Cheers,
the_crowbar

yes but nokia is taiwanese

[Colin Smith]

or japanese or swedish or swiss or something like that . Apple is american .

Re:yes but nokia is taiwanese

[TeknoHog]

Nokia and Linus are Finnish. Microsoft is American.

There's also a chip from TI

[hero_or_what]

http://focus.ti.com//general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12843&contentId=53243#omap4Benefits. Seems to do similar things but has more technical information rather than just a press release.

The original Nintendo DS has a 2 core CPU

[dbIII]

The original Nintendo DS has a dual core ARM CPU. Why is it such a big deal in a smartphone that costs several times as much more than five years later?

Re:The original Nintendo DS has a 2 core CPU

[janisozaur]

Doesn't it have two separate cores? One 67.028 MHz ARM946E-S and one 33.514 MHz ARM7TDMI

Re:The original Nintendo DS has a 2 core CPU

[dbIII]

Yes, two cores is indeed two cores even if they are at different clock speeds and require some thought to use. Memory management is a bitch compared with an x86 since there is no MMU, but other than that it's 1.5 times the CPU of the first machine I ran linux on.

HTC Tilt 2 ?

[DavidD_CA]

I'm not entirely certain, but I thought that the HTC Tilt 2 (AT&T and others) had two processors. Granted, one was for the phone subsystem, and the other for the OS, but still. Maybe someone can elaborate.

Either way, I've been thinking we need to add more processing power to phones for a long time. They are way too slow for the things we want to be able to do with them. But, the offset is the battery life. :(

Re:Why?

[peppepz]

You mean a Apple fanboy? Funny, because I just meant to say that Apple's products don't do much, but what they do, they do it well. Which I think is a pretty balanced point of view. I think that the original submission is much more fanboyish.

You need dual core for that ?

[Kilobug]

I'm surprised that you need dual-core for 1080p video. My N900 which is more than one year old is able to record and play 880p video, and is not a dual core. Just a slight increase in performance would be enough for 1080p. As for the iphone having the best processor, that would really surprise me, knowing it can't even multitask...

Re:Should really be called "half-battery-life"

[Vegemeister]

Perhaps just a little slow, yes. But what about the tiny screen with abominable color rendition?

HD? bah.

[Pegasus]

Wake me up when smart "phones" do 1080p 3D (two CCDs) @ 60fps, for 8h on one battery.

Re:HD? bah.

[Khyber]

Wouldn't that ideally be 6 CCDs? Three for each "eye" one for each RGB.

Re:hm

[dintech]

That's what he just said. What are you trying to contradict exactly?

David Lynch

[xororand]

David Lynch talks about watching film on a cell phone.

Cortex A9

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this anything more than ARM's Cortex A9 making it into chipsets?

Don't get me wrong, it's an extraordinary amount of progress, but it's not like the chip makers are doing all the innovation and competing here; ARM's done the real smarts and licensed the CPU IP to a number of chip makers who then have to integrate, verify and make a system out of it.

So it's no surprise that all the chip makers are coming out with multicore A9's at roughly the same time.

There's some speculation it's a Mali GPU

[Qubit]

After Samsung "announced that it is adopting the Mali [GPU]...for its future graphics-enabled ...SoC ICs", it sounds plausible that the speedup and the lack of information about the GPU could relate to this Mali technology from ARM.

ARM has recently released source for some parts of the Linux drivers for current Mali GPUs under GPLv2, which might be the first step towards ARM SoC's with fully-open GPU drivers.

There are no guarantees, but at the moment it appears that ARM is much more receptive to the idea of open GPU drivers than Imagination Tech (PowerVR GPUs) or NVidea.

I think it's a shame that AMD isn't moving faster w.r.t the embedded/mobile market. Sure, they're planning to make SoC's with a GPU on the same silicon, but as of last week they're not currently interested in competing with ARM for market share. And AMD's the chipmaker that's most actively supporting and creating open drivers for their graphics hardware.

It'll be interesting to see where the hardware goes in the next couple of years. Can Intel (and AMD, if they get serious) pull marketshare from ARM, or will the RISC chip reign supreme?

Re:Should really be called "half-battery-life"

[Khyber]

Develop? You mean process. You aren't using chemicals.

Multi-cores aren't necessary for video.

[jcr]

Adding general-purpose cores for video processing is barking up the wrong tree.

If your goal is to have a real-time HD video codec in a portable device, you really don't want to run that code on an ARM. What you want is dedicated hardware to perform the DCT, motion detection, and Golumb encoding.

-jcr

Re:hm

[nacturation]

It's not essential to see all the pixels, but when you have 1080p material and a phone, wouldn't it be good if the latter could play the former?

And maybe played by the phone itself? I know, it's a craaaazy idea but some people might actually want that...

You mean if the latter played the former? Wow, that IS a crazy idea!

Re:hm

[Jurily]

And maybe played by the phone itself? I know, it's a craaaazy idea but some people might actually want that...

And some people want to have sex with wallabies.

Re:hm

[mldi]

And maybe played by the phone itself? I know, it's a craaaazy idea but some people might actually want that...

And some people want to have sex with wallabies.

And now I'll be able to record it in 1080p on my phone!

Re:hm

[BobZee1]

Unless it is a motorola on verizon. They like to give you the hardware, but no ability to take full advantage of it. Gotta buy more to use what you already "own": http://www.intomobile.com/2010/08/30/droid-x-gets-full-hdmi-output-courtesy-of-real-hdmi/

Re:hm

[PsyciatricHelp]

Please someone put this in a TV so we can finally have 32" + with better resolutions. I want my 32" with 3240p.

Re:hm

[Lumpy]

And it's still a worthless feature.

1080p that is not compressed to oblivion that looks like crap takes up 25GB per hour.

How about giving us real storage in these damned things FIRST?

250GB phone is more important than the 100% useless 1080p video playback.

Re:hm

[poetmatt]

generally speaking, resolution has been going up and up. Look at apple's "retina" display and how well it does. I don't think it's unreasonable to look for 1080p capability on a phone, and it also thankfully means that it will be a push away from bluray as well.

1080p on a flashlight

[maroberts]

1080p on a tiny cellphone screen? Tell me when they have that on a flashlight. Imagine all the detail you won't be able to see in the tiny beam!

..would be quite good as you could shine it on a wall, vastly enlarged.

Wait a minute, I've thought of a name for that.... a projector!

Re:hm

[capnal]

With faster download speeds and greater bandwidth streaming video is an option-- no need for huge amounts of storage past room for a decent sized buffer.

Re:hm

[TheRaven64]

The N900 comes with 32GB of Flash built in, so it's enough for an episode of a TV show at 1080p by your metrics. I think you're talking nonsense though. BluRay disks store 25GB per side. If your assessment were accurate then this would be enough for 2 hours on a dual-layer disk, one hour on a single-layer disk. Given that most BluRay movies come on single-layer disks and don't take up the entire layer, and that TV stations use less bandwidth than BluRay, I wonder where you are getting this '1080p that is not compressed to oblivion' from, because it's certainly not any existing source.

For reference, the maximum AV bitrate of BluRay is 48Mb/s, giving 21GB/hour. For HD-DVD, it was 36Mb/s, giving 16.2GB/hour. In practice, most films are encoded at a lower quality, often as low as 10GB/hour. By the time that these make it into phones, they are likely to have at least 64GB of flash in the higher end.

Re:hm

[stdarg]

I will play it in 1080p on my phone!

And here you go.

[gmarsh]

http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-32-guruplug-server-plus.aspx

$129 gets you a Guruplug Server Plus. It doesn't have a dual core CPU, but a 1.2GHz ARM9 gives plenty of grunt. Has half a gig of DDR2, half a gig of NAND, 2 gigabit ethernet jacks, USB, eSATA and a SD slot. And it happily runs Debian.

Re:And here you go.

[illogict]

I recently bought some http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/network_storage/freeagent_dockstar/ (they're really cheap nowadays, got them for 25€ each here in France, saw that you can have them for 20$ in the USA). Same 1.2GHz ARM, 4 USBs, and GigE, but only 128MB of RAM. I installed some ArchLinux-based distro on it (http://www.plugapps.com/index.php5?title=Portal:PlugBox_Linux), and thought it would happily serve as a web gallery server (written with C, using the EFLs). Those things really miss some DSP or Neon instructions, the thumbnail generation is really slow as hell...

Re:hm

[GooberToo]

Not to mention, there isn't much point in having maximum visual quality when the provided display can't natively present it in its full, native, glory. And really the point is just to have high quality video available in your pocket. You can still have high quality, fully enjoyable, to the full limits of your device's display, at lessor compression rates and still have it look considerably better than we have today.

Really, the important part here is recording at higher video rates more so than play back. If you want high quality playback, attempting to lipstick a pig isn't really helpful. But the ability to create high quality video for playback on other, high quality display devices (your TV or computer) is far more important.

CL 9

[amiga500]

The CL 9 remote control (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9) contained both an 8 bit CPU and a 4 bit CPU, and that was in 1985. Just imagine what Woz could have done with a dual-core 6502!

Re:Should really be called "half-battery-life"

[TheRaven64]

Why not? It has HDMI output, so it can drive a large screen. It has bluetooth, so you can connect a keyboard and mouse. It will probably have 64GB of flash, with an slot for more, so you can store a lot of data on it. In terms of CPU and GPU power, it's faster than my previous laptop and my mother's current desktop.

SmartBooks?

[IYagami]

These are netbooks with ARM processors. However, I am waiting for Google Chrome OS.

You an find Engadget firtst impressions of the Toshiba AC100 smartbook at http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/07/toshiba-ac100-smartbook-preview-what-were-you-expecting/

Re:SmartBooks?

[fnj]

Very interesting and (sorry) stupid product. 1024x600 is for the birds. Absolute crap. I require a REAL display (1280x800 absolute minimum), and Ubuntu, with all its available packages, or something very like it. The horsepower is most definitely there to support this.

Re:hm

[TheRaven64]

The chip in question comes with HDMI hardware, so you just need to solder up a port. The point is that you can carry 1080p content around with you, downscale it for playback on the built-in screen, and play it back at full quality when you plug in an external display.

It's also worth remembering that a lot of current prototypes include a built-in picoprojector, so it's not totally implausible that you could play back 1080p content with a next-but-one generation phone on any available wall. The only issue then is sound, although some decent headphones would probably work.

Re:hm

[TheKidWho]

I disagree, a 1080p movie at 8gb looks just fine.

Who has HDMI displays?

[GameboyRMH]

The next most popular consumer electronic device: HDMI to RCA converters, so that I, and other people who aren't stereotypical wealthy American consumers, can use all these HDMI-output devices on TVs we actually own. The only HDMI display I have is the LCD on my gaming PC, and I don't see myself having any more anytime soon. The only other people I know with any HDMI displays are either PC gamers with HDMI on their gaming LCD, or filthy rich people with giant shiny expensive new TVs.

So I'm ordering a couple of VGA to RCA converters for hooking up some newer PCs to TVs, HDMI to RCA is the next converter box I'll need.

Re:hm

[GooberToo]

I honestly forgot about the cell phone pico projectors. But since you mention then, I don't believe they typically support better than 800x600 - at least not today. There are pico projectors which allow for full resolution HD output but they are much, much larger than a cell phone in of themselves.

and play it back at full quality when you plug in an external display.

Well, that was entirely the point of the poster to whom you originally replied. The available storage for "full quality" HD simply doesn't exist on smart phones. Today, 8-16GB is the norm. High end devices make 32GB a possibility. Even if we double it again, 64GB isn't all that much storage for high quality HD video. Which means, at the end of the day, you're focus is on creating HD content and having available, highly compressed, yet still very acceptable, re-encoded video for your pocket viewing pleasure; even if a pico projector becomes small enough and can do better than the provided display.

Re:and waste 4 times the money

[jedidiah]

>WOW and all at same time 4 inch screen at 1080P what an idea start selling monitors like that folks WHAT IDIOT thought this one up ...probably someone tired of futzing with Handbrake or AirVideo.

The fact that video content is not "universal" like MP3 and AAC is one of the biggest annoyances of PMPs.

The fact that my small screen video player can deal with files optimized for my 60 inch HDTV is very convenient.

That would work if...

[e065c8515d206cb0e190]

My parallel programming professor likes to harp on the fact that nearly all new computers in the future will be multicore. Apparently he's right.

That would work if all programmers in the future were parallel programmers.

Re:That would work if...

[Yvan256]

But if we believe the parallel universes theory, aren't we all programming in parallel already?

Re:hm

[jedidiah]

> With faster download speeds and greater bandwidth streaming video is an option-- no need for huge amounts of storage past room for a decent sized buffer.

Meh. I'm still waiting for phone networks to manage to keep up with the mundane side of the web. Nevermind video.

Storage will catch up (assuming people manage to look at someone besides Apple) long before the network is allowed to.

We're talking about providers that still want to soak you for text messaging. Forget about pervasive, reliable, high speed networking suitable for video.

Re:hm

[SimonTheSoundMan]

How many users will ever use the HDMI output though?

I wouldn't say all new phones have HDMI, the iPhone only has composite and component.

Re:hm

[peppepz]

I think you have to see it as a next-gen tv out. HDMI will probably be *the* preferred way to connect video sources and sinks together, even when "HD" features are not strictly required.

Example use case 1: you're on holiday at the end of a day and want to show your friends the pictures you've taken that morning.
Example use case 2: you're in a hotel room and there's nothing good on TV, so you might watch a movie you stored on your phone.

As for the iPhone, it is traditionally slow in getting new features, for instance it got a front facing camera in 2010. You'll see that next year's iPhone will have a (an?) HDMI output.

Wait for it...

[cbope]

It can do 1080p, but only if you don't hold it "the wrong way"...

Let me fix that for you

[sootman]

"Apple, which is generally believed to have the highest margins and profits in the market today, will roll out a dual-core iPhone when they're damn good and ready."

It is my firm belief that Android will soon capture the bulk of the market--they're already closing in fast, largely because they're available on more carriers (which is good) but also because they're cheaper. You won't be seeing "buy one, get one" from Apple anytime soon. Just as with desktops, the low end of the market is NOT where Apple wants to be. Apple does what they want, when they want, and they make tons on money doing it, so why would they change?

obligatory

[conspirator57]

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Spaceballs

        [Dark Helmet and Sandurz come across an image of themselves viewing the screen. As they react, the screen mimics what they are doing]
        Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at?! When does this happen in the movie?!
        Colonel Sandurz: "Now". You're looking at "now", sir. Everything that happens now [indicates himself and Helmet] is happening "now". [Indicates the screen]
        Dark Helmet: What happened to "then"?
        Colonel Sandurz: We passed "then".
        Dark Helmet: When!?
        Colonel Sandurz: Just now. Were at "now," now.
        Dark Helmet: Go back to "then"!
        Colonel Sandurz: When?
        Dark Helmet: Now!
        Colonel Sandurz: "Now?"
        Dark Helmet: Now!
        Colonel Sandurz: I can't.
        Dark Helmet: Why!?
        Colonel Sandurz: We missed it.
        Dark Helmet: When!?
        Colonel Sandurz: Just now.
        Dark Helmet: ... When will "then" be "now"?
        Colonel Sandurz: Soon.
        Dark Helmet: [backpedals in shock] How soon?
        [Corporal rewinds the tape back to scene showing protagonists wandering in desert.]
        Corporal: Sir!
        Dark Helmet: What?!
        Corporal: We have identified their location.
        Dark Helmet: Where?!
        Corporal: It's the moon of Vega!
        Colonel Sandurz: Good work, set a course and prepare for our arrival!
        Dark Helmet: [increasingly panicked] When?!
        Corporal: 1900 hours, sir!
        Colonel Sandurz: By high noon tomorrow, they will be our prisoners!
        Dark Helmet: Who?!! [mask falls down]

Re:but iphone cant even run 2 apps at the same tim

[yabos]

GDamn, people are still retarded here. iPhone has been running multiple processes since it first came out. How else do you think it checks email, runs the phone, etc. while you're doing some other foreground function? The Darwin kernel on the iPhone multitasks and multithreads just as well as it does on a desktop. Also you seem to be completely unaware of the fact that Apple just released the iOS 4 software allowing 3rd party applications to run threads when they're not in the foreground. Stuff like VOIP, background downloading, music streaming etc.

Apple already preparing for this

[yabos]

The iOS SDK has Grand Central Dispatch, which is Apple's easy way of dispatching and managing multiple threads. If you program your application with these APIs, as soon as a dual core iPhone comes out your application will take advantage of the 2nd core.

Re:hm

[MightyYar]

250GB phone is more important than the 100% useless 1080p video playback.

You say this as if the two are exclusive of one another - as if the manufacturer said, "Well, we can put either 1080p or 250GB of storage on the phone... 1080p it is!".

The fact is that they are loading as much storage as they can in a package that costs $600 and fits in your pocket. 250GB of flash ram in a slim profile would cost the manufacturer somewhere north of $1000. On the other hand, 1080p comes almost "free" when you add video-out and increase the processing power - things that they were going to do anyway.

So do you think that people would pay $1600 or so for a Droid that can store and output a full 1080p movie or two? Wouldn't it be more cost effective at that point to just buy/rent the Blu-Ray and bring that to your friend's house instead?

Re:and waste 4 times the money

[DurendalMac]

Yeah, because who would want to record 1080p? Pffft! And who would want to get a movie that they can watch on their computer at 1080p, but have to downscale and convert to get onto their phone!

Intel calls it Hyper-Threading

[tepples]

What's the benefit of processing using imaginary cores?

Simultaneous multithreading splits a CPU into two imaginary cores. When one gets stalled on SDRAM access, the other feeds instructions to the execute units.

It is my money.

[tepples]

You don't have to agree, as it's not your money

It is my money. Assume for a moment that the market segments into appliances, where the owner doesn't have root, and PCs, where the owner has root. If the majority of people choose appliances, the economies of scale for the PC market are likely to vanish. This means people who want a PC can't afford one, and there won't be enough of a market to support development of applications targeted at PC hobbyists. This has allegedly already happened in the video game market with the split between consoles and PCs. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, consoles had a near-monopoly on TV gaming, and they still have a monopoly share on some game genres.

Ad hoc or enterprise?

[tepples]

You can distribute apps and update to devices over the air, by push or by asking employees to follow a link, you can even host the apps yourself. Apple even gives you the tools to do all of this.

The last time I read about this, there were two methods to do this: "ad hoc" and enterprise. "Ad hoc" is limited to 100 devices, while the enterprise developer agreement requires 500 employees in the organization. I didn't see any option for businesses in the middle.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/

To which of the numerous web pages and PDF documents linked from this page were you referring?

Which alternative do you recommend?

[tepples]

If you don't like it, don't buy it. There are alternatives.

I have 300 USD, and I don't want to spend it on an iPod touch 4 because there are things about iOS that I disagree with. Nor do I want to pay 70 USD per month for another phone line. What comparable Android device should I buy?

Stylus vs. finger

[tepples]

Palm and a few Windows Mobiles had touchscreen and Apple released one years later.

Newton, Palm, and Pocket PC had stylus touch screens. Apple introduced a device with a finger touch screen, a modality that turned out to be more popular among end users.

Not all Android devices have a phone number

[tepples]

In fact some of the largest Android game developers have boycott the Android Market.

From the article you linked:

Customers can now enter their phone number on Gameloft’s site and receive a free demo version of any game. If users like what they see, they can then purchase the full game by having it billed to their carrier. Credit card payments on the website are no longer accepted.

So how would somebody interested in a Gameloft product buy it and use it on an Android device that happens not to have a phone number?

How does Blu-ray over USB fall over?

[tepples]

USB isn't a good for streaming, it would fall over with Bluray.

Please explain how Blu-ray over USB falls over. It certainly isn't bandwidth. Hi-Speed USB theoretical max: 480 Mbps. Actual throughput: half that. BD-Video bandwidth: 54 Mbps. In fact, I see external USB BD-ROM/DVD+RW combo drives on Amazon.

Re:upscaling?

[mjwx]

As another poster mentioned, lens quality starts to really matter that at 1080p--much more so that 720p.

True, but I wasn't talking about photo's/videos.

If I keep a sales .ppt or demo .avi on my phone, I can show this to perspective new clients without carrying around a heavy laptop using readily available equipment. I can watch the latest episode of something on the projector during lunch.

I already think any one using their phone for serious photography/video is mad anyway.

Re:Should really be called "half-battery-life"

[Entropius]

Yes, the color rendition sucks. But I use Olympus Viewer (nee Studio), which gives the same color rendition that the camera's JPEG engine does. And I know the settings I want (noise filter off, contrast medium, etc.), and just use the raw images because of better demosaicing/sharpening and no luminance NR. (My camera's "NR = Off" setting is not really off.)

Now all we need is an OS to use it

[LostMyBeaver]

Seriously, who gives a shit about a telephone that can do more than an iPhone or whatever can now. 720p 30fps video is certainly good enough for a mobile phone. 1080p is only useful when we start using the phone to replace PCs. For that we need a PC operating system.

When will Mac OS X run ALL Mac software on the iPhone? Or when will <insert vendor's name here>'s phone start running Windows 7 64-bit. I want a phone with dual core, 1.0+ Ghz or better x86 or something with a dynamic translator that can run Mac OS X or Windows 7 64-bit. It needs wireless USB, wireless HDMI and my office desk chair should have an inductive charger in it so I can leave it in my pocket while I'm working.

Until we have that much, then who gives a crap about dual core processors on telephones? Last I checked my Mario DS runs just fine on a 67Mhz ARM9 CPU with a cheap crap GPU. Need for Speed runs great on a 412Mhz ARM 11 on my old iPhone 3G etc...

If they want to speed up the H.264 CODEC to handle 1080p, that's actually quite nice, then I can use it for high def movie playback, but unless they add enough storage space to make 20+ Mbps practical, I think I'll stick to 9Mbps 720p. Why more than double the pixels without at least doubling the bit rate to support it. Good quality scaled 720p is much better than crap quality 1080p any day. In fact, I'd rather have 1080i to get the higher field rate.

I think I'll wait patiently for Atom based phones before bothering with dual core in a hand held device. All this crap in-between is a hold me over for the real thing.

Re:Should really be called "half-battery-life"

[Khyber]

"The photo community uses "develop" for raw-format data, since you literally do not have an image until you do it"

That is pure bullshit on any digital camera. You have an image the second you snap the shutter, even in RAW format (there are readers that can read RAW programs, you don't need it in BMP/JPG/TIFF.)

Develop means taking an exposed negative image (where you truly have nothing) and activating the chemicals inside in a chemical bath to remove the coating and show the picture details.

Processing means taking that negative and transferring the image onto another piece of paper with color correction.

Come back when you have your own C-41 development lab in your home.